Momentum Market Structure ProThis first indicator in the Beyond Market Structure Suite gives you clear market structure at a glance, with adaptive support & resistance zones. It's the only SMC-style indicator built from momentum highs & lows, as far as I know. It creates dynamic support & resistance zones that change strength and resize intelligently, and gives you timely alerts when price bounces from support/rejects from resistance.
You’re free to use the provided entry and exit signals as a ready-to-use, self-contained strategy, or plug its structure into your existing system to sharpen your edge :
• Market structure bias may help improve a compatible system's win rate by taking longs only in bullish bias and shorts in bearish structure.
• Support/resistance can help trend traders identify inflection points, and help range traders define ranges.
🟩 HIGHLIGHTS
⭐ Unique market structure with different characteristics than purely price-based models.
⭐ Support and resistance created from only the extreme levels.
⭐ Support & resistance zones adapt to remain relevant. Zones are deactivated when they become too weak.
⭐ Long and short signals for a bounce from support/rejection from resistance.
🟩 WHY "MARKET STRUCTURE FIRST, ALWAYS"?
"There is only one side to the stock market; and it is not the bull side or the bear side, but the right side." — Jesse Livermore, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator (1923)
If the market is structurally against your trade, you're gonna have a bad time. So you must know what the market structure is before you plan your trade. The more precise and relevant your definition of market structure, the better.
🟩 HOW TO TRADE USING THIS INDICATOR (SIMPLE)
• Directional filter : The prevailing bias background can be used for any kind of trades you want to take. For example, you can long a bounce from support in a bullish market structure bias, or short a rejection from resistance in bearish bias.
• Entries : For more conservative entries, you could wait for a Candle Trend flip after a reaction from your chosen zone (see below for more about Candle Trend).
• Stops : The included running stop-loss level based on Average True Range (ATR) can be used for a stop-loss — set the desired multiplier, and use the level from the bar where you enter your trade.
• Take-profit : Similarly, you can set a Risk:Return-based take-profit target. Support and resistance zones can also be used as full or partial take-profit targets.
See the Advanced section below for more ideas.
🟩 SIGNALS
⭐ ENTRIES
You can enable signals and alerts for bounces from support and rejections from resistance (you'll get more signals using Adaptive mode). You can filter these by requiring corresponding market structure bias (it uses the bias you've already set for the background), and by requiring that Candle Trend confirm the move.
I've slipped in my all-time favourite creation to this indicator: Candle Trend. When price makes a Simple Low pivot, the trend flips bullish. When price then makes a Simple High pivot, the trend flips bearish (see my Market Structure library for a full explanation). This tool is so simple, yet I haven't noticed it anywhere else. It shows short-term trends beautifully. I use it mainly as confirmation of a move. You can use it to confirm ANY kind of move, but here we use it for bounces from support/rejections from resistance.
Note that the pivots and Zigzags are structure, not signals.
⭐ STOPS
You can use the supplied running ATR-based stop level to find a stop-loss level that suits your trading style. Set the desired multiplier, and use the level from the bar where you enter your trade.
⭐ TAKE-PROFIT
Similarly, you can set a take-profit target based on Risk:Return (R:R). If this setting is enabled, the indicator calculates the distance between the closing price and your configured stop, then multiplies that by the configured R:R factor to calculate an appropriate take-profit level. Note that while the stop line is reasonably smooth, the take-profit line varies much more, reflecting the fact that if price has moved away from your stop, the trade requires a greater move in order to hit a given R:R ratio.
Since the indicator doesn't know where you were actually able to enter a position, add a ray using the drawing tool and set an alert if you want to be notified when price reaches your stop or target.
🟩 WHAT'S UNIQUE ABOUT THIS INDICATOR
⭐ MOMENTUM PIVOTS
Almost all market structure indicators use simple Williams fractals. A very small number incorporate momentum, either as a filter or to actually derive the highs and lows. However, of those that derive pivots from momentum, I'm not aware of any that then create full market structure from it.
⭐ SUPPORT & RESISTANCE
Some other indicators also adjust S/R zones after creation, some use volume in zone creation, some increase strength for overlap, a few merge zones together, and many use price interactions to classify zones. But my implementation differs from others, as far as I can tell after looking at many many indicators, in seven specific ways:
+ Zones are *created* from purely high-momentum pivots, not derived or filtered from simple Williams pivots (e.g. `ta.pivothigh()`).
+ Zones are *weakened* dynamically as well as strengthened. Many people know that S/R gets stronger if price rejects from it, but this is only half the story. Different price patterns strengthen *or weaken* zones.
+ We use *conviction-weighted candle patterns* to adjust strength. Not simply +1 for price touching the zone, but a set of single-bar and multi-bar patterns which all have different effects.
+ The rolling strength adjustments are all *moderated by volume*. The *relative volume* forms a part of each adjustment pattern. Some of our patterns reward strong volume, some punish it.
+ We do our own candle modelling, and the adjustment patterns take this into account.
+ We *resize* zones as a result of certain candle patterns ("indecision erodes, conviction defends").
+ We shrink overlapping zones to their sum *and* add their strengths.
🟩 HOW TO TRADE USING THIS INDICATOR (ADVANCED)
In addition to the ideas in the How to Trade Using This indicator (Simple) section above, here are some more ideas.
You can use the market structure:
• As a bias for entries given by more reactive momentum resets, or indeed other indicators and systems.
• You could use a change in market structure to close a long-running trend-following position.
You can use the distance from a potential entry to the CHoCH line as a filter to choose higher-potential trades in ranging assets.
Confluence between market structure and your favourite trend indicator can be powerful.
Multi timeframe analysis
This is a bit of a rabbit hole, but you could use a split screen with this indicator on a higher timeframe (HTF) view of the same asset:
• If the 1D structure turns bullish, the next time that the 1H structure also flips bullish might be a good entry.
• Rejection from a HTF zone, confirmed by lower timeframe (LTF) structure, could be a good entry.
None of this is advice. You need to master your own system, and especially know your own strengths and weaknesses, in order to be a successful trader. An indicator, no matter how cool, is not going to one-shot that process for you.
In Adaptive mode, a skillful trader will be able to spot more opportunities to classify and use support and resistance than any algorithm, including mine, now that they've been automatically drawn for you.
If you are doing historical analysis, note that the "Calculated bars" setting is set to a reasonably small number by default, which helps performance. Either increase this number (setting to zero means "use all the bars"), or use Bar Replay to examine further back in the chart's history. If you encounter errors or slow loading, reduce this number.
🟩 SUPPORT & RESISTANCE
A support zone is an area where price is more likely to bounce, and a resistance zone is an area where price is more likely to reject. Marking these zones up on the chart is extremely helpful, but time-consuming. We create them automatically from only high-momentum areas, to cut noise and highlight the zones we consider most important.
In Simple mode, we simply mark S/R zones from momentum and Implied pivots. We don't update them, just deactivate them if price closes beyond them. Use this mode if you're interested in only recent levels.
In Adaptive mode, zones persist after they're traversed. Once the zones are created, we adjust them based on how price and volume interact with them. We display stronger zones with more opaque fills, and weaker zones with more transparent fills. To calculate strength, we first preprocess candles to take into account gaps between candles, because price movement after market is just as important in its own way. The preprocessing also redefines what constitutes upper and lower wicks, so as to better account for order flow and commitment. We use these modelled candle values, as well as their relative amplitude historically, rather than the raw OHLC for all calculations for interactions of price and zones. It's important to understand, when trying to figure out why the indicator strengthened or weakened a zone, that it sees fundamental price action in a different way to what is shown on standard chart candles (and in a way that can't easily be represented accurately on chart candles).
Then, we strengthen or weaken , and resize support and resistance zones dynamically using different formulas for different events, based on principles including these:
• The close is the market's "vote", the momentum shift anchor.
• Defended penetrations reveal validated liquidity clusters.
• Markets contract to defended levels.
• "The wick is the fakeout, but the close tells you if institutions held the level." — ICT (Inner Circle Trader)
Adaptive mode is more powerful, but you might need to tweak some of the Advanced Support & Resistance settings to get a comfortable number of zones on the chart.
🟩 MOMENTUM PIVOTS
The building blocks of market structure are Highs and Lows — places where price hits a temporary extreme and reverses. All the indicators I could find that create full market structure do so from basic price pivots — Williams fractals, being the highest/lowest candle wick for N candles backwards and forwards (there are some notable first attempts on TradingView to use momentum to define pivots, but no full structure). "Highest/lowest out of N bars" is the almost universal method, but it also picks up somewhat arbitrary price movements. Recognising this, programmers and traders often use longer lookbacks to focus on the more significant Highs and Lows. This removes some noise, but can also remove detail.
My indicator uses a completely different way of thinking about High and Low pivots. A High is where *momentum* peaks and falls back, and a low is where it dips and then recovers. While this is happening, we record the extremes in price, and use those prices as the High or Low pivot zones.
This deliberately picks out different, more meaningful pivots than any purely price-based approach, helping you focus on the swings that matter. By design, it also ignores some stray wicks and other price action that doesn't reflect significant momentum. Price action "purists" might not like this at first, but remember, ultimately we want to trade this. Check and see which levels the market later respects. It's very often not simply the numerically higher/lower local maxima and minima, but the levels that held meaning, interpreted here through momentum.
The first-release version uses the humble Stochastic as the structural momentum metric. Yes, I know — it's overlooked by most people, but that's because they're using it wrong. Stochastic is a full-range oscillator with medium excursions, unlike RSI, say, which is a creeping oscillator with reluctant resets. This makes Stoch (at the default period of 14) not quite reactive enough for on-the-ball momentum reset entry signals, but close to perfect (no metric is 100%) for structural pivots.
Stochastic is also a solid choice for structure because divergences are rare and not usually very far away in terms of price. More reactive momentum metrics such as Stochastic RSI produce very noisy structure that would take a whole extra layer of interpreting (see Further Research, below).
For these reasons, I may or may not add other options for momentum. In the initial release, I've added smoothed RSI as an alternative just to show it's possible, which takes even longer than Stochastic to migrate from one extreme to another, creating an interesting, longer-term structure.
🟩 IMPLIED PIVOTS
We want pivots to mark important price levels so that we can compute market direction and support & resistance zones from them.
In this context, we see that some momentum metrics, and Stochastic in particular, tend to give multiple consecutive resets in the same direction. In other words, we get High followed by High, or Low followed by Low, which does not give us the chance to create properly detailed structure. To remedy this, we simply take the most extreme price action between two same-direction pivots, and create an Implied pivot out of it, after the second same-direction pivot is created.
Obviously these pivots are created very late. Recalling why we wanted them, we realise that this is fine. By definition , price has not exceeded the Implied Pivot level when they're created. So they show us an interesting level that is yet untested.
Implied Pivots are thus created indirectly by momentum but defined directly by price. They are for structure only. We choose not to give them a Dow type (HH, HL, LH, LL) and not to include them in the Main Zigzag to emphasise their secondary nature. However, Implied Pivots are not "internal" or "minor" pivots. There is no such concept in the current Momentum Market Structure model.
If you want less responsive, more long-term structure, you can turn Implied Pivots off.
🟩 DOW STRUCTURE
Dow structure is the simplest form of market structure — Higher Highs (HHs) and Higher Lows (HLs) is an uptrend (showing buyer dominance), and vice-versa for a downtrend.
We label all Momentum (not Implied) Pivots with their Dow qualifier. You can also choose to display the background bias according to the Dow trend.
There is an input option to enable a "Ranging" Dow state, which happens when you get Lower Highs in an uptrend or Higher Lows in a downtrend.
🟩 SMC-STYLE STRUCTURE (BOS, CHOCH)
The ideas of trend continuation after taking out prior highs/lows and looking for early signs of possible reversal go back to Dow and Wyckoff, but have been popularised by SMC as Break Of Structure (BOS) and Change of Character (CHoCH).
BOS can be used as a trigger: for example:
• Wait for a bullish break of structure
• Then attempt to buy the pullback
• Cancel if structure breaks bearish (meaning, we get a bearish CHoCH break)
How to buy the pullback? This is the trillion-dollar question. First, you need solid structure. Without structure, you got nothin'. Then, you want some identified levels where price might bounce from.
If only we incorporated intelligent support and resistance into this very indicator 😍
Creating and maintaining correct BOS and CHoCH continuously , without resetting arbitrarily when conditions get difficult, is technically challenging. I believe I've created an implementation of this structure that is at least as solid as any other available.
In general, BOS is fully momentum‑pivot‑driven; CHoCH is anchored to momentum pivots but maintained mainly by raw price extremes relative to those anchors (breaks are obviously pure price). This means that the exact levels will sometimes differ from your previous favourite market structure indicator.
We have made some assumptions here which may or may not match any one person's understanding of the "correct" way to do things, including: BOS is not reset on wicks because, for us, if price cannot close beyond the BOS there is no BOS break, therefore the previous wick level is still important. The candidate for CHoCH on opposing CHoCH break *is* reset on a wick, because we want to be sure to overcome the leftover liquidity at that new extreme before calling a Change of Character. The CHoCH is moved on a BOS break. For a bullish BOS break, the new CHoCH is the lowest price *since the last momentum pivot was confirmed, creating the BOS that just broke*, and vice-versa for bearish. If there's a stray wick before that, which doesn't shift momentum, we don't care about it.
🟩 ZIGZAG
The Major Swing Zigzag dynamically connects momentum highs and lows (e.g., from a Higher Low to the latest Higher High), adjusting as new extremes form to reveal the overall trend leg.
The Implied Structure Zigzag joins momentum pivots and Implied pivots, if enabled.
🟩 REPAINTING
It's really important to understand two things before asking "Does it repaint?":
1. ALL structure indicators repaint, in the sense of drawing things into the past or notifying you of things that happened in past bars, because by definition, structure needs some kind of confirmation, which takes at least one bar, usually several. This is normal.
2. Almost all indicators of ANY kind repaint in that they display unconfirmed values until the current bar closes. This is also normal.
Most features of this indicator repaint in the ordinary, intended ways described above: the pivots (Implied doubly so), BOS and CHoCH lines, and formation of S/R zones.
The Zigzags, by design, adjust themselves to new pivots. The active lines often change and attach themselves to new anchors. This is a form of repainting. It's important to note that the Zigzags are not signals. They're there to help visualise market structure, and structure does change. Therefore, I prioritised clearly explaining what price did rather than preserving its history.
One of the "bad" kinds of repainting is if a signal is printed when the bar closes, but then on a later bar that "confirmed" signal changes. This is a fundamental issue with some high timeframe implementations. It's bad because you might already have entered a trade and now the indicator is pretending that it never signalled it for you. My indicators do not do this (in fact I wrote an entire library to help other authors avoid this).
If you are ever in any doubt, play with an indicator in Bar Replay mode to see exactly what it does.
To understand repainting, see the official docs: www.tradingview.com
🟩 FURTHER RESEARCH
I've attempted to answer two of the tricky problems in technical analysis in Pine: how to do robust and responsive market structure, and how to maintain support and resistance zones once created. However, this just opens up more possibilities. Which momentum metrics are suitable for structure? Can more reactive metrics be used, and how do we account for divergences in a structural model based on key horizontal levels? Which sets of rules give the best results for maintaining support and resistance? Does the market have a long or a short memory? Is bar decay a natural law or a coping mechanism?
🟩 CREDITS
❤️ I'd like to thank my humble trading mentor, whose brilliant ideas inspire me to garble out code. Thanks are also due to @Timeframe_Titans for guidance on the finer points of market structure (all mistakes and distortions are my own), and to @NJPorthos for feedback and encouragement during the months in the wilderness.
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